Subsembly: the Smart Solution for Smart Cards in .NET
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Smart Cards, already popular in Europe, are gaining popularity in the US for personal identification and authentication. Enabling Smart Card access in your applications allows you to provide an additional layer of security. In this article, Divijay Chauhan discusses how to enable Smart Card applications in .NET using Subsembly to make the job a lot easier.
Smart Cards have gained popularity in a lot of diverse areas such as personal identification, authentication and e-banking. Europeans have used them for a long time now but now Smart Cards are catching up in the United States. The reason is simple: they provide a secure medium to store and access small amounts of critical information such as certificates and private keys.
I first saw them in use in an office of TATA Consultancy Services, where those responsible for developing some code for Microsoft were asked to use these small, credit-card-like cards for logging onto Windows 2000/XP and to remote servers located in Redmond. I was curious and I've learned a lot about them since then.
By providing support for Smart Cards on desktop machines, Microsoft has provided developers with a lot of power that they can use to Smart Card enable the solutions they evolve. For instance, they can use Smart Cards to provide a secure login to some enterprise applications or to the desktop itself.
In this article we’re going to review Smart Cards on Windows in general and the .NET way of developing Smart Card enabled applications in particular. Along the way I shall also introduce the Smart Card Subsembly and discuss its role in helping developers to design their solutions.
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